1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
The present invention relates to creation and use of long folded optical paths in a compact structure for use with lasers in making optical measurements or systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Note that the following discussion refers to a number of publications by author(s) and year of publication, and that due to recent publication dates certain publications are not to be considered as prior art vis-a-vis the present invention. Discussion of such publications herein is given for more complete background and is not to be construed as an admission that such publications are prior art for patentability determination purposes.
Multiple pass optical cells with dense spot patterns are very useful for many applications, especially when the cell volume must be minimized relative to the optical path length. Present methods to achieve these dense patterns require very expensive, highly precise astigmatic mirrors and complex alignment procedures to achieve the desired pattern. This invention describes a new, much simpler and less demanding mirror system comprising inexpensive cylindrical mirrors which can meet all of the requirements and be aligned much more readily.
Multiple pass optical cells are used to achieve very long optical path lengths in a compact footprint and have been extensively used for absorption spectroscopy, (White, J. U., “Long Optical Paths of Large Aperture,” J. Opt. Soc. Am., vol. 32, pp 285-288 (May 1942); Altmann, J. R. et al., “Two-mirror multipass absorption cell,” Appl. Opt., vol. 20, No. 6, pp 995-999 (15 Mar. 1981)), laser delay lines (Herriott, D. R., et al., “Folded Optical Delay Lines,” Appl. Opt., vol. 4, No. 8, pp 883-889 (August 1965)), Raman gain cells (Trutna, W. R., et al., “Multiple-pass Raman gain cell,” Appl. Opt., vol. 19, No. 2, pp 301-312 (15 Jan. 1980)), interferometers (Herriott, D. H., et al., “Off-Axis Paths in Spherical Mirror Interferometers,” Appl. Opt., vol. 3, No. 4, pp 523-526 (April 1964)), photoacoustic spectroscopy (Sigrist M. W., et al., “Laser spectroscopic sensing of air pollutants,” Proc. SPIE, vol. 4063, pp. 17 (2000)) and other resonators (Yariv, A., “The Propagation of Rays and Spherical Waves,” from Introduction to Optical Electronics, Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, Inc., New York (1971), Chap. 2, pp 18-29; Salour, M. M., “Multipass optical cavities for laser spectroscopy,” Laser Focus, 50-55 (October 1977)).
These cells have taken the form of White cells (White, J. U., “Long Optical Paths of Large Aperture,” J. Opt Soc. Am., vol. 32, pp 285-288 (May 1942)), integrating spheres (Abdullin, R. M. et al., “Use of an integrating sphere as a multiple pass optical cell,” Sov. J. Opt. Technol., vol. 55, No. 3, pp 139-141 (March 1988)), and stable resonator cavities (Yariv, A., “The Propagation of Rays and Spherical Waves,” from Introduction to Optical Electronics, Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, Inc., New York (1971)).
The stable resonator is typified by the design of Herriott (Herriott, D. H., et al., “Off-Axis Paths in Spherical Mirror Interferometers,” Appl. Opt., vol. 3, No. 4, pp 523-526 (April 1964)). The simplest such Herriott cell consists of two spherical mirrors of equal focal lengths separated by a distance d less than or equal to four times the focal lengths f of the mirrors. This corresponds to stable resonator conditions. A collimated or focused laser beam is injected through the center of a hole in one of the mirrors, typically an off-axis location near the mirror edge. The beam is periodically reflected and refocused between these mirrors and then exits through the center of the input hole (defining the re-entrant condition) after a designated number of passes N, in a direction (slope) that is different from the entry slope. As a result, the total optical path traversed in the cell is approximately N×d. The pattern of reflected spots observed on the mirrors in these cells forms an ellipse. Re-entrant conditions for spherical mirror Herriott cells are restricted by certain predetermined ratios of the mirror separation d to the focal length f and the location and slope of the input beam. For any re-entrant number of passes N, all allowed solutions are characterized by a single integer M. Excellent descriptions for the design, setup and use of these cells are given by Altmann (Altmann, J. R., et al., “Two-mirror multipass absorption cell,” Appl. Opt., vol. 20, No. 6, pp 995-999 (15 Mar. 1981)) and McManus (McManus, J. B., et al., “Narrow optical interference fringes for certain setup conditions in multipass absorption cells of the Herriott type,” Appl. Opt., vol. 29, No. 7, pp 898-900 (1 Mar. 1990)).
When the cell volume must be minimized relative to the optical path length or where a very long optical path (>50 m) is desired, it is useful to increase the density of passes per unit volume of cell. The conventional spherical mirror Herriott cell is limited by the number of spots one can fit along the path of the ellipse without the spot adjacent to the output hole being clipped by or exiting that hole at a pass number less than N. This approximately restricts the total number of passes to the circumference of the ellipse divided by the hole diameter, which in turn is limited by the laser beam diameter. For a 25-mm radius mirror with a relatively small 2-mm diameter input hole located 20 mm from the center of the mirror, a maximum of about (π×2×20)/2≈60 spots, or 120 passes is possible at best. Generally the hole is made larger to prevent any clipping of the laser input beam that might lead to undesirable interference fringes, and typical spherical Herriott cells employ less than 60 passes.
Herriott (Herriott, D. R. and Schulte, H. J., “Folded Optical Delay Lines,” Appl. Opt., vol. 4, No. 8, pp 883-889 (August 1965)) demonstrated that the use of astigmatic mirrors could greatly increase the spot density, and hence optical path length, in the cell. Each mirror has different finite focal lengths (fx and fy) along orthogonal x and y axes, and the mirrors are aligned with the same focal lengths parallel to one another. The resulting spots of each reflection on the mirrors create precessions of ellipses to form Lissajous patterns. Since these patterns are distributed about the entire face of each mirror, many more spots can be accommodated as compared to a cell with spherical mirrors. Herriott defines the method of creating the astigmatic mirror is to distort a spherical mirror, either in manufacture or in use, by squeezing a spherical mirror in its mount. He states that the amount of astigmatism required is very small and amounts to only a few wavelengths. McManus (McManus, et al., “Astigmatic mirror multipass absorption cells for long-path-length spectroscopy,” Appl. Opt., vol. 34, No. 18, pp 3336-3348 (20 Jun. 1995)) outlines the theory and behavior of this astigmatic Herriott cell and shows that the density of passes can be increased by factors of three or more over spherical mirror cells. For these astigmatic mirror cells, light is injected through a hole in the center of the input mirror. Allowed solutions for re-entrant configurations are characterized by a pair of integer indices Mx and My, since there are now two focal lengths present along orthogonal axes.
The drawback of this design is that the constraints to achieve useful operation are very severe. First of all, both Mx and My must simultaneously be re-entrant, so that for a desired N and variable distance d, the focal lengths fx and fy, must be specified to a tolerance of 1 part in 104. Since mirrors can rarely be manufactured to such tolerances, this cell as originally proposed is impractical for routine use. However, Kebabian (U.S. Pat. No. 5,291,265 (1994)) devised a method to make the astigmatic cell usable. Starting with the astigmatic Herriott setup with the same mirror axes aligned, he then rotates one mirror around the z-axis (FIG. 2), thereby mixing the (previously independent) x and y components of the beam co-ordinates. A moderate rotation of ˜5-20 degrees and a small compensating adjustment of the mirror separation distance can accommodate the imprecision in the manufacturing of the mirror focal lengths. However, this approach is still difficult to achieve in practice and requires complex calculations and skill to get to the desired pattern. Furthermore, the astigmatic mirrors must still be custom made and cost many thousands of dollars for a single pair.
Recently, Hao (Hao, L.-Y., et. al., “Cylindrical mirror multipass Lissajous system for laser photoacoustic spectroscopy,” Rev. Sci. Instrum., vol. 73, No. 5, pp. 2079-2085 (May 2002)) described another way to generate dense Lissajous patterns using a pair of cylindrical mirrors, each having a different focal length, and where the principal axes of the mirrors are always orthogonal to one another. In essence, this creates a pair of mirrors whose x-axis comprises one curved surface (mirror A) of focal length fx and one flat mirror surface (mirror B), and in the y-axis comprises one flat mirror surface (on mirror A) and one curved surface of focal length fy (mirror B), where fx≠fy. Formulas to predict the spot patterns on each mirror are provided. The advantage to this system is that the dense Lissajous patterns can be formed from a pair of inexpensive mirrors, in contrast to the requirement for custom astigmatic mirrors (we note that for a practical commercial multipass cell, one cannot rely on simply squeezing spherical mirrors to achieve a reliable long term, stable set of focal lengths. Thus diamond turned custom astigmatic mirrors must be made). The drawback of this mismatched focal length pair of cylindrical mirrors is that, similar to the astigmatic Herriott cell, for a given pair of focal lengths, there is only one allowed re-entrant solution value of N permitted. Of course, for photoacoustic measurements as intended by Hao, where any exiting light is not detected, the light does not necessarily have to be re-entrant and many values of mirror separation which are not re-entrant, but do generate many passes, are useful.
The present invention describes a simple, low cost and more easily aligned high density multipass optical cell, where many different paths can be achieved with the same set of mirrors. The key to this invention is the use of cylindrical mirrors with nominally equal focal lengths. When two cylindrical mirrors are aligned such that the curved axes are crossed at 90 degrees (orthogonal condition), they generate spot patterns similar to a spherical Herriott cell, except that the stable resonator conditions restrict the allowed separations to 0<d≦2f. If the entry point of the laser beam is off the central axis, elliptical spot patterns similar to a spherical cell are generated; if the beam enters through the center of one mirror, then lines instead of ellipses form and different re-entry restrictions apply.
The present invention has also determined that, by rotating the cylindrical mirrors to angles δ other than 90 degrees, the previously elliptical or linear spot patterns degenerate into dense Lissajous patterns of spots that generally fill a rectangularly-spaced region of each mirror. Without complex alignment procedures, and starting from a predetermined 90 degree crossed pattern, one can readily generate predicted dense patterns and much longer optical path lengths by twisting either mirror over the unrestricted range of rotation angle δ. This works for both off-axis and central axis input holes and almost any value of N can be achieved within the stability constraints for d and at almost any rotation. Unlike the astigmatic cell or mismatched cylindrical cell, achieving alignment of these spot patterns does not rely on the absolute manufactured focal lengths, but only on the easily adjusted ratio d/f and relative twist angle of the two cylindrical axis planes.